Emile Bernard the unwilling modern

Abstract

The introduction presents Bernard as a neglected example of tensions between modernism and traditionalism in late nineteenth and early twentieth century painting. It analyses the key terms of modernism, Symbolism and classicism, and states previously ignored connections between the phases of Bernard’s career as the central theme of the thesis. Chapter one revisits a well known part of Bernard’s career, his early years in Paris and Pont-Aven. Esthetic contradictions are observed between Bernard’s representation of his modern experience and his nostalgic sources of inspiration. These are connected to nis wish to transcend what he understood as the secular values of modern French life. Bernard’s search fora modern Catholic esthetic is examined in relation to his friendship with Vincent van Gogh, to his troubled relationship with Paul Gauguin and to his brief participation in Joséphin Péladan’s Salon of the Rose+Croix. Chapter two discusses the Orientalist works which Bernard painted during his stay in Egypt between 1893 and 1903. Bernard’s modernist revision of conventional Orientalist forms in his Egyptian painting, and his contemporary Symbolist writings for the Mercure de France, are regarded as an extension of his previous experimentation in France. His development of a new traditionalist esthetic after 1896 is seen as a continuing expression of persistent contradictions inhis art. It is observed that he continued to draw inspiration from such a seminal modernist figure as Manet even as his open contempt for the contemporary avant-garde coloured the reception of his work as exhibited by Voliard in 1901.Chapter three examines Bernard’s two influential essays on Cézanne of 1904 and 1907.Bernard’s developing opinion of Cézanne as an increasingly flawed figure who linked modernist painting to the art of the past is seen as reflecting his contempt for the Cézannism of his radical contemporaries, as well as mirroring his dissatisfaction with his own troubled traditionalism. Cnapter four is concerned with Bernard‘s early twentieth century painting as seen in the context of the writings on Cézanne by progressive critics and the paintings being made by such younger modernists as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. The evidence of a modern sense of dislocation and fragmentation present beneath the surface of Bernard’s traditionalism is seen as connecting him to the preoccupations of contemporary radical painting at the same time as his violent conservatism made him an ever more marginalised painter and critic. Chapter five deals with Bemard’s painting and critical writings of the 1920s, and in particular with his address to younger painters who were then adopting classicist pictorial forms. The sense in Bernard’s painting and writing of the irreparable loss of past pictorial knowledge, comparable to the mood of contemporary Italian classicists, is contrasted to the radically deformed classicism then prevalent in France. Bernard’s increasing identification with Delacroix and his rejection of the example of Ingres is related to his antipathy for modernist uses of Ingres’ painting. Chapter six observes links between Bernard’s mature painting and the early surrealism of Salvador Dali. It argues that the assemblage of borrowed and disconnected pictorial fragments in Dali’s painting affords an explicit representation of the processes guiding Bernard’s work. The strange, monumental Cycle Humain which Bernard painted in the 1920s in response to the First World War is taken as an example of his increasingly difficult effort to sustain his ambitious traditionalist painting in the face of modern change. Chapter seven concludes the thesis with a discussion of Bernard’s historical and biographical writings, in which he expressed his growing pessimism as an artist who was involved in a process of historical decay that he ultimately sensed he could not resist.